Spring 2025
Understanding Architecture
Mark R. Johnson MArch, Director of Development, DivcoWest Real Estate Investments
How does one understand a work of architecture? We can look to the humanities to help answer this question. For example, identifying a poem's characteristics its form, rhyme, meter, and imagery can enrich one's understanding of the poet's artistic intent and the meaning ascribed to the work today. What are the analogous methods for understanding a work of architecture? Using the finest examples of American architecture located on the Harvard campus, students are asked to analyze buildings using a rigorous conceptual framework and then synthesize their findings according to how contemporary observers may ascribe meaning to the built work.
Spring 2025
Reinventing the Boston Museum of Fine Arts: The Twentieth Century and Today
Mary Crawford-Volk PhD
Anyone visiting a major art museum today quickly realizes how popular such places have become. Crowds overflow special events, timed tickets sell out, exhibition schedules stretch to meet demand. Contributing to this is the fact that art museums' traditional roles acquiring, displaying, and preserving works of art have evolved to embrace a larger agenda as important cultural centers, where dining, shopping, and socializing now complement, and can even compete with, the art. Boston's Museum of Fine Arts (MFA) offers an especially rich example of this phenomenon. Treating it as a case study, the course examines the MFA's twentieth-century development as a world-class treasure-house of masterpieces, and then consider a range of such issues that bear on its continuing vitality today. Recently, these also include ethical questions about object provenances, procedures for new acquisitions, commercial sources of revenue, appropriate exhibition content, and programming for diverse audiences. Looking at what the museum is doing to address these issues opens questions about the art museum of the future another fascinating subject.
January 2025
History of Photography
Collier Brown PhD, Research Advisor in Social Science and Humanities, Harvard Extension School
This course surveys the history of photography from its origins in 1839 to present, from Louis-Jacques-Mand Daguerre to Sally Mann and Dawoud Bey. We begin in France with the story of the daguerreotype and follow that narrative as it introduces not only new techniques and technologies but new schools of thought around the way we see and describe our world.
Fall 2024
Matisse and America
Mary Crawford-Volk PhD
French painter Henri Matisse (1869-1954) has long been recognized as one of the most significant avant-garde painters of the twentieth century. What is much less well understood are his extensive connections with American patrons, collectors, museums, and artists. Unlike his great contemporary Pablo Picasso, Matisse visited this country several times, lending his celebrity to exhibitions and publications and expressing admiration for various aspects of American life. His work also attracted much attention from American critics beginning with the 1913 Armory Show, and this intensified from the 1930s onward. He also inspired attention from important artists here early and late, from Max Weber (d. 1961) to Richard Diebenkorn (d. 1993) and Roy Lichtenstein (d. 1997). In effect, Matisse's relationship with America was one of reciprocity, in which Americans figured decisively in within the development of his career, and his art in turn influenced the history of modernism in the United States. This course focuses on these areas of Matisse's achievement, examining their role in his personal development as well as the richness they brought to our own cultural history.
Prerequisites: Familiarity with nineteenth and twentieth-century European painting through prior courses is recommended.